A new survey of the general population in the US and Canada found that ‘35% of North Americans believe AI will be capable of performing most tasks in the legal field by the end of 2025’ – which suggests that there’s a lot of education to be done with regard to what legal AI can and cannot do, as well as what value human lawyers actually bring to a case.
The survey result by Canadian legal tech company Alexi is perhaps not surprising given how AI is presented in the wider media. Although, that said, most representations of lawyers in US TV shows and movies tend to show them passionately arguing with judges in court, or shouting at each other across the office – with very little tech involved.
Perhaps it’s simply that most people engage with lawyers via the medium of documents, and documents appear to be ‘easy to do with AI’. Hence ‘it’s all easy’…..? Which of course is…well….a simplification of massive proportions.
To make lawyers feel better the survey also found that: ‘47% believe AI will be able to perform most tasks currently done by humans in financial services’. I.e. working in banking, for example, is even ‘easier’ than being a lawyer.
In terms of the bigger picture, this is a risky situation. If the general public think legal work is so easy, as it were, that a ‘raw LLM’ can do it for you without any special technical input, guardrails, or oversight from a real lawyer, then that will lead to more people doing ‘law by ChatGPT’, just as in the past people did ‘law by Reddit’.
But….it does also show there is a strong appetite for AI-driven legal services that can at least get people half-way there, as seen recently with the pre-Seed round for Contend, which is a genAI platform for consumer legal needs.
One more positive spin here is that it shows that people presumably are happy to see lawyers using AI….although they may then expect some price reductions for more ‘simple’ matters, given 35% believe AI will do ‘most legal tasks by the end of 2025’.
Note: There were 2,000 respondents, among them 1,000 U.S. 18+ adults and 1,000 Canadian 18+ adults.
More about Alexi here